Arizona State University (commonly referred to as ASU or Arizona State) is a national space-grant institution and public metropolitan research university located in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area of the U.S. state of Arizona.

December 8, 2016 - ... the University of Arizona (Top College No. 220) is a public research school founded in 1885 that emphasizes giving students real-world experience in their area of study to better prepare them for the workforce. The university has well-regarded ...

December 8, 2016 - PHOENIX, Dec. 8, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- A Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant has been awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to Phoenix-based NeuroEM Therapeutics, Inc. and Arizona State University. The grant will seek to ...

December 8, 2016 - Drawing upon the research of Thomas Mortenson, senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, Ms. Pappano notes: “Nearly thirty years ago, legislative appropriations provided 59 percent of core revenues at public ...

December 6, 2016 - "What a lot of people don't realize is that 60 percent of the freight on Arizona's roads simply passes through Arizona from one state to another state," said Arizona State University professor Michael Kuby. "So we have to deal with the related ...

December 6, 2016 - “Transdisciplinary” means applying one field of knowledge to another. It's a hallmark of Arizona State University. Sometimes it's on purpose: “What if we applied economic theory to avian social behavior?” Sometimes it's by accident with a happy result ...

December 5, 2016 - The Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC) has announced Arizona State University as its partner institution after a competitive, nationwide search. HASTAC is a leading organization in the pursuit of innovative ...

December 2, 2016 - But getting funding for novel research ideas can be challenging. Arizona State University and Mayo Clinic are addressing this challenge. For 13 years the Mayo-ASU seed grant program has funded — or seeded — promising new research collaborations ...

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December 2, 2016 - "In a developed market, you are competing with cheaper forms of conventional power generation, such as gas and also hydro. Energy storage costs still have some way to come down for a hybrid plant like Kennedy Energy Park to be competitive," he said.

It is the largest public university in the United States by enrollment. Founded in 1885 as the Tempe Normal School for the Arizona Territory, the school came under control of the Arizona Board of Regents in 1945 and was renamed Arizona State College. A 1958 statewide ballot measure gave the university its present name. In 1994 ASU was classified as a Research I institute; thus, making Arizona State one of the newest major research universities (public or private) in the nation.

Arizona State’s mission is to create a model of the “New American University” whose efficacy is measured “by those it includes and how they succeed, not by those it excludes”.

ASU awards bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees, and is broadly organized into 16 colleges and schools spread across four campuses: the original Tempe campus, the West campus in northwest Phoenix, the Polytechnic campus in eastern Mesa, and the Downtown Phoenix campus. All four campuses are accredited as a single institution by the Higher Learning Commission. The University is categorized as a Research University with very high research activity (RU/VH) as reported by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, with a research expenditure of $385 million in 2012. Arizona State is one of the appointed members of the Universities Research Association, a consortium of 86 leading research-oriented universities.

They are able to provide the raw material needed to generate the hundreds of different cell types that comprise the human body.

Think of it as a reverse e pluribus unum. Something like out of one, come many.

Brafman has received a $420,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to take discoveries related to hPSCs out of the research lab and into the clinical setting where they can transform, even save, lives.

In particular, his research focuses on using the remarkable qualities of hPSCs to generate large quantities of hPSC-derived neurons, which are instrumental in advances toward the study and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, spinal cord injuries and other neurodegenerative disorders.

“Neurodegenerative diseases and disorders remain some of the leading causes of mortality and morbidity in the United States,” said Brafman, a biomedical engineering faculty member in ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.

“Several bottlenecks limit the translation of hPSCs and their derivatives from bench to bedside,” said Brafman, referring to the need to take this research from the laboratory bench to the clinical bedside.

For one, it requires billions of cells for research in disease modeling, drug screening, and cell-based therapies to be successful. So far, a rapid and comprehensive generation of these cells hasn’t been possible, and Brafman’s research aims to usher in the large-scale expansion of hPSC-derived neurons needed for these treatments and research applications.

“If successful, this work will provide researchers robust methods to generate the large quantities of cells needed for clinical applications,” Brafman said.

ASU researcher creates system to control robots with the brain

A researcher at Arizona State University has discovered how to control multiple robotic drones using the human brain.

A controller wears a skull cap outfitted with 128 electrodes wired to a computer. The device records electrical brain activity. If the controller moves a hand or thinks of something, certain areas light up.

“I can see that activity from outside,” said Panagiotis Artemiadis (pictured above), director of the Human-Oriented Robotics and Control Lab and an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. “Our goal is to decode that activity to control variables for the robots.”

If the user is thinking about decreasing cohesion between the drones — spreading them out, in other words — “we know what part of the brain controls that thought,” Artemiadis said.

A wireless system sends the thought to the robots. “We have a motion-capture system that knows where the quads are, and we change their distance, and that’s it,” he said.

Up to four small robots, some of which fly, can be controlled with brain interfaces. Joysticks don’t work, because they can only control one craft at a time.

DNA may be the blueprint of life, but it’s also a molecule made from just a few simple chemical building blocks. Among its properties is the ability to conduct an electrical charge, fueling an engineering race to develop novel, low-cost nanoelectronic devices.

Now, a team led by ASU Biodesign Institute researcher Nongjian “N.J.” Tao and Duke theorist David Beratan has been able to understand and manipulate DNA to more finely tune the flow of electricity through it. The key findings, which can make DNA behave in different ways — cajoling electrons to smoothly flow like electricity through a metal wire, or hopping electrons about like the semiconductors materials that power our computers and cellphones — pave the way for an exciting new avenue of research advancements.

The results, published in the online edition of Nature Chemistry, may provide a framework for engineering more stable and efficient DNA nanowires, and for understanding how DNA conductivity might be used to identify gene damage.

Building on a series of recent works, the team has been able to better understand the physical forces behind DNA’s affinity for electrons.

“We’ve been able to show theoretically and experimentally that we can make DNA tunable by changing the sequence of the ‘A, T, C, or G’ chemical bases, by varying its length, by stacking them in different ways and directions, or by bathing it in different watery environments,” said Tao, who directs the Biodesign Center for Biolectronics and Biosensors and is a professor in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.

A novel, inexpensive method for detecting the Zika virus could help slow spread of outbreak, and potentially other future pandemic diseases

An international, multi-institutional team of researchers led by synthetic biologist James Collins, Ph.D., at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, has developed a low-cost, rapid paper-based diagnostic system for strain-specific detection of the Zika virus, with the goal that it could soon be used in the field to screen blood, urine, or saliva samples.

“The growing global health crisis caused by the Zika virus propelled us to leverage novel technologies we have developed in the lab and use them to create a workflow that could diagnose a patient with Zika, in the field, within 2-3 hours,” said Collins, who is a Wyss Core Faculty member, and Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science and Professor of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Department of Biological Engineering.

Building off previous work done at Harvard’s Wyss Institute by Collins and his team, along with collaborators from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Harvard Medical School (HMS), University of Toronto, Arizona State University (ASU), University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison), Boston University (BU), Cornell University, and Addgene, joined their efforts to quickly prototype the rapid diagnostic test and describe their methods in a study published online May 6 in the journal Cell, all within a matter of six weeks. Collins is the paper’s corresponding author.

Thanga and a team of graduate and undergraduate students — including Mercedes Herreras-Martinez, Andrew Warren and Aman Chandra — have spent the past two years developing the SunCube FemtoSat. It’s tiny — 3 cm by 3 cm by 3 cm. Thanga envisions a “constellation of spacecraft” — many eyes in many places. A swarm of them could inspect damaged spacecraft from many angles, for example.

Thanga and the School of Earth and Space Exploration will host a free kickoff event Thursday night introducing the SunCube, followed by a panel discussion with scientists and space-industry professionals on the logistics, opportunities and implications of this breakthrough technology. (Find event details here.)

Launch and launch-integration costs currently run into $60,000-$70,000 per kilo. The Russians, the Chinese and the Indians all charge about the same amount, too. That can get pretty pricey for a full-size satellite.

“These high costs put out of reach most educational institutions and individuals from the ability to build and launch their own spacecraft,” ASU’s team wrote in a paper detailing the new model.

Launch expenses for the SunCube FemtoSat will cost about $1,000 to go to the International Space Station or $3,000 for flight into low-Earth orbit. (Earth escape will cost about $27,000.)

“That was a critical price point we wanted to hit,” Thanga said. When SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket lifts off later this year, Thanga expects costs to drop by as much as half.

Parts cost for a SunCube FemtoSat should run in the hundreds of dollars. A garage hobbyist could literally fly his or her own mission. One example is the solar panels. They aren’t available off the shelf in this size, so students cut them from scraps sold at a huge discount by manufacturers.

“That’s part of our major goal — space for everybody,” Thanga said. “That’s how you invigorate a field. … Getting more people into the technology, getting their hands on it.”

SpaceTREx is a systems lab, so the team members were less interested in creating a tiny spacecraft than they were solving a problem: Can lots of little spacecraft do the job of a single large spacecraft?

Over the two years they’ve worked on the spacecraft, Thanga and his grad students have stayed focused on miniaturization with a vision toward creating disposable spacecraft for exploration.

“There’s a whole community out there interested in this idea of low-cost, swarms of disposable spacecraft,” Thanga said.

And they’re getting smaller and smaller, thanks to smartphone tech, which has miniaturized everything.

“We’re piggybacking on the wave of miniaturization,” Thanga said. “We’re interested in tackling the space access problem. What if we can have students send experiments into space? With something as small as this, you can make mistakes and send again.”

Earth and environmental scientists have often had to rely on piloted aircraft and satellites to collect remote sensing data, platforms that have traditionally been controlled by large research organizations or regulatory agencies.

Thanks to the increased affordability and dramatic technological advances of drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), however, earth and environmental scientists can now conduct their own long-term high-resolution experiments at a fraction of the cost of using aircraft or satellites.

“UAVs are poised to revolutionize remote sensing in the earth and environmental sciences,” says Enrique Vivoni, hydrologist and professor at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration and Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. “They let individual scientists obtain low-cost repeat imagery at high resolution and tailored to a research team’s specific interest area.”

What happens after you flush the toilet is becoming a big deal.

In a just-published article in the science journal v, Arizona State University water treatment expert Bruce Rittmann and two colleagues propose a paradigm-shifting change in the treatment of wastewater, a shift they say could have a dramatic global impact. They outline ways to transition from conventional wastewater treatment, which removes contaminants and disposes of them, to advanced used-water resource-recovery methods that would be environmentally and economically advantageous.

In other words, your dirty water could be mined for useful and valuable resources — like nitrogen or phosphorous.

The technologies for doing this are being explored today, but challenges remain before they can be used on a large scale and meaningful way. Rittmann, an engineering professor in ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering and director of the Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology in ASU’s Biodesign Institute talks about the new methods and what they can provide.

Question: These sound like very attractive and potentially useful technologies. Why aren’t they being implemented, or at least developed further, now?

Answer: For decades, the conventional thinking was that anaerobic treatment processes are not efficient enough to treat domestic wastewater due to its low organic concentration and low temperature. Also, conventional aerobic treatment (e.g., activated sludge) has served us well as a means of “treatment only.” Only in recent years have we begun to question the assumption that the only goal is “treatment.” Since conventional processes did their assigned task well and energy costs were relatively low (most of the time), we didn’t have the impetus to do anything different.

In the past 10 years or so, a pull to reduce energy and to limit the greenhouse gas costs of treatment has changed our perspective. Combined with new materials (membranes and electrodes), we now have new tools to “push” development and to complement the “pull” of the desire to reduce energy and greenhouse gas impacts. The same reasoning exists for nutrient recovery — no “pull” until recently, and some new materials to give it a “push.”

Q: What are the environmental benefits of these technologies?

A: By shifting from energy negative to energy positive, the anaerobic technologies seriously reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of treatment. Recovering nutrients prevents their discharge into surface waters and thus minimizes the acceleration of aging and dead zones in our lakes, reservoirs and oceans.

Q: What are the economic benefits of these technologies?

A: The anaerobic processes can be used to generate energy not consume it. Electricity use is the largest non-personnel expense in treatment, and shifting it from a cost to a profit center has a huge economic benefit to a municipality. In addition, the anaerobic processes generate much less sludge that has to be treated and hauled off to the landfill. Currently, sludge treatment and disposal constitute the second largest operating expense. Recovering nitrogen and phosphorus also can provide an additional income stream if the quality of the products is good enough to sell. At a minimum, the sale of nitrogen and phosphorus products should offset the costs of removing them.

Q: What is the next step needed to convert wastewater treatment plants into resource generators?

A: On the technology side, various technologies are at different stages. An anaerobic membrane bioreactor is pretty well advanced and in large-scale testing now. It should be ready to go full scale soon. The phosphorus- and nitrogen-recovery processes are commercially available for other applications, but need to be optimized and tested for nitrogen and phosphorus recovery from anaerobically treated effluent. The microbial electrochemical cells are at the pilot stage now and need significant development.

The most important steps are less technical and more economic and policy oriented. First, municipalities need to realize that they can dramatically reduce their costs of treatment and make their operations much more sustainable through these methods. They have to get out of the “business as usual” mindset. Second, society has to embrace using resources that are recovered from “used water.” They have to see that the economic and sustainability benefits are huge, and they have to break down regulatory and other barriers to using recovered materials. Third, we need markets for most of the outputs. While energy can be used internally to run the facility, the good outcome of being an energy exporter requires that the exports be valued in the market. Markets now are poorly developed or non-existent.

Since prehistoric times, clays have been used by people for medicinal purposes. Whether by eating it, soaking in a mud bath, or using it to stop bleeding from wounds, clay has long been part of keeping humans healthy. Certain clays have also been found with germ-killing abilities, but how these work has remained unclear.

A new discovery by Arizona State University scientists shows exactly how two specific metallic elements in the right kinds of clay can kill troublesome bacteria that infect humans and animals.

“We think of this mechanism like the Trojan horse attack in ancient Greece,” said Lynda Williams, a clay-mineral scientist at ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE). “Two elements in the clay work in tandem to kill bacteria.”

She explained, “One metallic element — chemically reduced iron, which in small amounts is required by a bacterial cell for nutrition — tricks the cell into opening its wall. Then another element — aluminum — props the cell wall open, allowing a flood of iron to enter the cell. This overabundance of iron then poisons the cell, killing it as the reduced iron becomes oxidized.”

“It’s like putting a nail in the coffin of the dead bacteria,” said Keith Morrison, Williams’ former doctoral student, who is now at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Morrison is the lead author of the paper reporting the discovery, which was published Jan. 8 in Nature Scientific Reports. Rajeev Misra, a microbiology professor in ASU’s School of Life Sciences (SOLS) is the third author of the paper. Morrison’s work in Misra’s laboratory gave insights into the mechanism by which clays work to kill bacteria. Both SESE and SOLS are units in the university’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

A critical part of the investigation involved the use of ASU’s NanoSIMS, which is part of the National Science Foundation-supported Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry Facility. The study also benefited from a variety of electron microscopes and X-ray equipment in the LeRoy Eyring Center for Solid State Science.

French green clay leads to Oregon blue clay

A chance discovery of a medicinal clay from Europe caught Williams’ attention and put her on the track. A French philanthropist with clinical experience in Africa told her about a particular green-hued clay found near the philanthropist’s childhood home in France. The philanthropist, Line Brunet de Courssou, had taken samples of the clay to Africa, where she documented its cure for Buruli ulcer, a flesh-eating skin disease, in patients in the African country of Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast).

Williams attempted to locate the site of the green clay deposit, which was in the French Massif Central region. When the search proved unsuccessful, she began systematically testing clays sold online as “healing clays.”

After testing dozens of samples, Williams and her team identified a blue-colored clay from the Oregon Cascades that proved to be highly antibacterial. The research reported in the paper shows that it works against a broad spectrum of human pathogens, including antibiotic-resistant strains such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

The colors of the clays reflect their origins, Williams said. The greens and blues of antibacterial clays come from having a high content of chemically reduced iron (Fe2+), as opposed to oxidized iron (Fe3+), which gives the familiar red color of rust (Fe-oxide), often associated with many clays. Reduced clays are common in many parts of the world, typically forming in volcanic ash layers as rocks become altered by water that is oxygen-deprived and hydrogen-rich.

“The novelty of this research is two-fold: identifying the natural environment of the formation of clays toxic to bacteria, and how the chemistry of these clays attacks and destroys the bacteria,” said Enriqueta Barrera, a program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research.

Because blue and green clays are found abundantly in nature, Williams said, this discovery of how their antibacterial action works should lead to alternative ways of treating infections and diseases that are persistent and hard to heal with antibiotics.

Williams said, “Discovery of how natural clays kill human pathogens may lead to a new economic use of such clays and also to new drug designs.”

Discovery of malleable epigenetic processes in ant brains has implications for the study of human behavior and disease

In Florida carpenter ant colonies, distinct worker castes called minors and majors exhibit pronounced differences in social behavior throughout their lives. In a new study published today in Science, a multi-institution team anchored at University of Pennsylvania found that these caste-specific behaviors are not set in stone. Rather, this pioneering study shows that social behavior can be reprogrammed, indicating that an individual’s epigenetic, not genetic, makeup determines behavior in ant colonies.

Epigenetics is the study of stable, or persistent, changes in gene expression that occur without changes in DNA sequence. Epigenetic regulation has been observed to affect a variety of distinct traits in animals, including body size, aging, and behavior. However, there is an enormous gap in knowledge about the epigenetic mechanisms that regulate social behavior.

Ants provide ideal models to study social behavior, because each colony is comprised of thousands of individual sisters — famously, the queen and all workers are female — with nearly identical genetic makeup, much like human twins. However, these sisters possess stereotypically distinct physical traits and behaviors based on caste.

In a previous study, the authors created the first genome-wide epigenetic maps in ants. This revealed that epigenetic regulation is key to distinguishing majors as the “brawny” soldiers of carpenter ant colonies, compared to minors, their smaller, “brainier” sisters. Major ants have large heads and powerful mandibles that help to defeat enemies and process and transport large food items. Minor ants are much smaller, outnumber majors two to one, and assume the important responsibility of searching for food and recruiting other ants to help with the harvest. Compared to majors, these foraging minors have genes involved in brain development and neurotransmission that are over expressed.

In the new findings, an interdisciplinary research team led by senior author Shelley Berger, PhD, from the Perelman School of Medicineat the University of Pennsylvania, in collaboration with teams led by Juergen Liebig from Arizona State University and Danny Reinberg from New York University, found that caste-specific foraging behavior can be directly altered, by changing the balance of epigenetic chemicals called acetyl groups attached to histone protein complexes, around which DNA strands are wrapped in a cell nucleus. To reveal this exquisite control, the team demonstrated that foraging behavior could be reprogrammed using compounds that inhibit the addition or removal of these acetyl groups on histones (histone acetylation), in turn changing the expression of nearby genes.

Berger is the Daniel S. Och University Professor in the Departments of Cell & Developmental Biology, Biology, and Genetics. She is also the director of the Penn Epigenetics Program.

“The results suggest that behavioral malleability in ants, and likely other animals, may be regulated in an epigenetic manner via histone modification,” said lead author Daniel F. Simola,PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the Penn Department of Cell and Developmental Biology. Simola is co-lead author with Riley Graham, a doctoral student in the Berger lab.

It’s All About the Histone

The almost decade-long collaboration between the Berger, Liebig, and Reinberg labs, supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, blends molecular biology with observations of animal behavior to understand how caste-based differences arise in ants.

Ants, as well as termites, and some bees and wasps, are eusocial (or “truly social”) species. Previous work suggested that histone acetylation could create dramatic differences in gene expression between genetically identical individuals, contributing to the physical differences in body size and reproductive ability between ant castes.

The current study expands on this narrative by showing that caste behaviors are also regulated by epigenetic changes in histone acetylation. To do so, the team used the fact that chromatin structure — the coiling of the DNA around histone proteins — can be altered by the addition of acetyl groups, which ultimately changes the compaction of the genome. Modifications like histone acetylation allow DNA to uncoil, whereas others cause DNA to become tightly compact and inaccessible to the proteins that regulate gene expression.

Knowing that histone modifications are used to establish specific features of different tissues within an individual led the team to ask whether histone modifications might also be used to create differences in traits like social behavior between individuals, notably the brawny majors and the brainy minors. In the Science paper, the team fed foraging minors a chemical inhibitor that prevents cells from removing acetyl groups from histones. This treatment enhanced foraging and scouting for food, and correspondingly, led to increased histone acetylation near genes involved in neuronal activity. Conversely, inhibiting the addition of acetyl groups led to decreased foraging activity.

In contrast to the dramatic boost in foraging seen in minors, feeding mature major workers these inhibitors caused little to no increase in foraging. However, the team found that directly injecting these epigenetic inhibitors into the brains of very young majors immediately increased foraging, reaching levels normally only observed in minors. Additionally, a single treatment with these inhibitors was sufficient to induce and sustain minor-like foraging in the majors for up to 50 days. These results suggest that there is an “epigenetic window of vulnerability” in young ant brains, which confers increased susceptibility to environmental manipulations, such as with histone-modifying inhibitors.

Berger observes that all of the genes known to be major epigenetic regulators in mammals are also present in ants, which makes ants “a fantastic model for studying principles of epigenetic modulation of behavior and even longevity, because queens have a much longer lifespan compared to the major and minor workers. Because of the remarkable window we have uncovered, ants also provide an extraordinary opportunity to explore and understand the epigenetic processes that come into play to establish behavioral patterns at a young age. This is a topic of increasing research interest in humans, owing to the growing prevalence of behavioral disorders and diseases and the appreciation that diet may influence behavior.”

Broader Implications

One important gene implicated in the ant study is CBP, which is an epigenetic “writer” enzyme that alters chromatin by adding acetyl groups to histones. CBP had already been implicated as a critical enzyme facilitating learning and memory in mice and is mutated in certain human cognitive disorders, notably Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome. Hence, the team’s findings suggest that CBP-mediated histone acetylation may also facilitate complex social interactions found in vertebrate species.

The authors suspect that CBP’s role as an epigenetic writer enzyme contributes to patterns of histone acetylation that enhance memory pathways related to learned behaviors such as foraging. Differences in CBP activity between minor and major castes may guide unique patterns of gene expression that fine tune neuronal functions for each caste.

“From mammalian studies, it’s clear this is an important protein involved in learning and memory,” Berger noted. “The finding that CBP plays a key role in establishing distinct social behaviors in ants strongly suggests that the discoveries made in ants may have broad implications for understanding social organization.”

After a decade-long $3 billion international effort, scientists heralded the 2001 completion of the human genome as a moon landing achievement for biology and the key to finally solving intractable diseases like cancer.

But it turns out this was only the end of the beginning, with a much greater complexity to life revealed by the roughly 20,000 genes found within the human genome. For one, most diseases are incredibly complex, with very few caused by a single gene mutation. Rather, the more accurate picture is many acting genes acting in concert, with the routes to disease looking like public transit or subway maps.

Since then, efforts such as the modENCODE project – a $57 million multi-center initiative funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) – have been aimed at identifying all the genome elements that can turn on and off genes.

Now, an international scientific team, led by Arizona State University professor and Biodesign Institute researcher Marco Mangone, has added a new worldwide resource with the first library built for researchers to explore genes’ deep and hidden messages. The paper was published in BMC Genomics (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/16/1036, DOI 10.1186/s12864-015-2238-1).

The end of the message

“If the genome is considered the blueprint of the cell, proteins are the really bricks and mortars,” said Josh LaBaer, director of the Virginia Piper Center for Personalized Diagnostics, which aims to undercover the telltale early warning signs of disease from a systematic study of all of the proteins in the human body, a field called proteomics.

But to make proteins, first the DNA genomic information must be transcribed with complete fidelity, chemical letter by letter into an intermediary molecule, called messenger RNA, or mRNA. In what is known as the central dogma of biology, DNA makes RNA, which makes protein.

Marco Mangone, a core faculty member in LaBaer’s center, has devoted his career to looking at a peculiar region found at the ends of the mRNA sequence information, called untranslated elements, or UTRs. As the name suggests, these regions do not go on to make protein, but stresses Mangone: “They have to be there for a reason.”

Mangone’s raison d’etre is to understand the function of every UTR in the human body, called the 3’UTRome (3′ indicates a location at the end of the mRNA).

And so he and his team have painstakingly put together the first and largest human 3?UTRome library in the world. It is made up of 1,461 human 3?UTRs to date (representing about 10 percent of genome), and freely available to the worldwide scientific community to explore all aspects of biology, gene regulation and disease.

Shooting the messenger

Sophocles first wrote in his Greek civil war play “Antigone“: “no one loves the messenger who brings bad news.” And when all roads led to ancient Rome, and messengers were sent about delivering the news, a revolutionary change occurred in communications tactics: killing the messenger to prevent the communication from taking place.

Mangone, a native Italian who did his doctoral studies in Rome, has harkened back to this strategy when examining the role of the 3’UTRome. His lab uses standard molecular biology and bioinformatics tools to study the production, function and disease contributions of UTRs and their role in governing gene expression. He pioneered this work in a simple animal, the worm C. elegans, and now, in the new BMC paper, toward human genomics.

Why would this elaborate system be in place? Based on numerous studies, the role of the 3’UTRome is complicated, but one major theme that has emerged is to prevent the mRNA message from ever being delivered, or in biology terms, ever translated into protein.

Small RNAs, called micro RNAs (miRNAs), work to pair with a UTR to block translation, killing the message, and thus, silencing a gene. Uncovering the interplay between miRNA and their specific UTRs have become a hot area in biology, and big business.

Big pharma, big future

These gene silencers have become all the rage in the pharmaceutical industry. So much so, that the global miRNA research market was valued at nearly $295.1 million in 2011 and is expected to reach $763 million by 2017.

It’s become big business because of their potential as therapeutics for the treatment of some severe diseases, including cancer and genetic disorders, by introducing specific miRNAs into diseased cells to silence the defective gene.

A broad portfolio of miRNA pathway drug candidates have been developed, some already in Phase II clinical trials, showing promising clinical data in different areas of medicine, such as cancer, HCV infection, and cardiovascular diseases.

By combining semiconducting nanowires and bacteria, researchers can now produce liquid fuel.

Three pioneers in the field of synthetic photosynthesis discuss the potential of this technology and the challenges that must be overcome to make it commonplace.

Imagine creating artificial plants that make gasoline and natural gas using only sunlight. And imagine using those fuels to heat our homes or run our cars without adding any greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. By combining nanoscience and biology, researchers led by scientists at University of California, Berkeley, have taken a big step in that direction.

Peidong Yang, a professor of chemistry at Berkeley and co-director of the school’s Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute, leads a team that has created an artificial leaf that produces methane, the primary component of natural gas, using a combination of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria. The research, detailed in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August, builds on a similar hybrid system, also recently devised by Yang and his colleagues, that yielded butanol, a component in gasoline, and a variety of biochemical building blocks.

The research is a major advance toward synthetic photosynthesis, a type of solar power based on the ability of plants to transform sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into sugars. Instead of sugars, however, synthetic photosynthesis seeks to produce liquid fuels that can be stored for months or years and distributed through existing energy infrastructure.

December 2, 2016 - "In a developed market, you are competing with cheaper forms of conventional power generation, such as gas and also hydro. Energy storage costs still have some way to come down for a hybrid plant like Kennedy Energy Park to be competitive," he said.

December 1, 2016 - SEATTLE - When firefighter paramedics Morlon Malveaux and Mark Pedeferri learned that their powerhorse diesel ambulance was going to be traded for a gas-powered hybrid they were more than a little concerned. The two, who run a Medic One rig ...